Jargon

 

 

I’ve never been adept at jargon. It must be a speech defect of some kind, or maybe a bit of neuro-divergeance.  I like straight talk, preferably concrete with visual references; although I do enjoy humor.

It’s so bad that I just recently brought myself, finally, to refer to the children in our First Communion class as “kiddos.” It was in writing, where it’s easier to experiment. Now, kids is what I called my offspring, my childhood friends and siblings (us kids), and all the many children I’ve worked with over the years. “Children” seems a bit too poetic. Of course, adults corrected us: “Baby goats are kids; these are children.” I had baby goats too, but never confused the two. (I recently saw a reference to “kids and doggos.”

This jargon-avoidance goes across the board. I am, as you might guess, a Catholic—a practicing one, and involved with Sunday liturgy as a cantor. Unlike worshippers at Pentecostal churches, where a spontaneous “Praise God!” or “Amen!” is welcomed, we Catholics (like my Episcopalian brothers and sisters) have a firm, designated set of responses that is strongly encouraged and not open to variation.

For thirty years after Vatican II, we always responded to the greeting, “The Lord be with you!” with the friendly “And also with you!” The Episcopalians still use those words. Some in the Roman Catholic Church found this, and some of our other prayer responses, to be too far removed from the Latin. In 2011 they changed just enough wording to make our Creed and Gloria and Holy impossible to pray from memory. The dependable “And also with you,” became, “And with your spirit.”

My quirk has made this adjustment difficult.  In the Creed we used to pray “He was born of the Virgin Mary and became man..” Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto.”. You can see the problem here. The plain English didn’t capture the sense of “incarnatus” quite well enough, so that had to be changed to “He was incarnate of the Virgin Mary.” I have yet, 13 years in, to be able to pronounce these words from memory. Fortunately, we have to bow at that point in the Creed, which gives me a chance to slur over it or allow the old wording to slip out under my breath.

So, you see, religious language is not exempt from my struggle with terminology that seeks to be over-specific to the point of losing touch with normal language. I think that’s how I would define what I called “jargon” above.  And it affects both conservatives and liberals.

But here is the instance that most recently spurred me to write this.  I was at my thrift store job, pricing books. Our mission as a company is to provide jobs for those with developmental disabilities, and we have a number of such workers. On that day, one of the workers was passing by with his mentor, and she referred in a derogatory tone to “hetero-normative individuals.”  Wait! That’s me she’s talking about, I realized.

This term would have been unimaginable even in the last decades of the last century, when hetero- was still considered a norm in gender relations for most people.

I’m not a homophobe or a bigot; I wouldn’t be working there if I were diversity-adverse—“diversity,” here, understood as embracing all the many cultural, linguistic, developmental, religious, and sexual expressions in our world. I live in a highly diverse neighborhood, in a diverse apartment complex; I go to a church that, on the diocesan level, serves speakers of scores of languages. DEA is not something I have a problem with (DEA being an acronym unknown in the 1990s, even if the concept was very much alive.)

So, it’s not that the idea of gender being somewhat fluid is foreign to me. In fact, I have long held to the scriptural reference from the popular Catholic hymn, “One Bread, One Body”: “Gentile or Jew, servant or free, woman or man, no more.” Our personhood comes before our gender identity in Christ. And this conviction arises not just from religious teaching but also from my own reflection on myself and other people I know. There is a spectrum of gender-identity ranging from the most feminine to the most utterly macho, with most of us falling on one side or other of the middle. That being the case, we have tended to go with the side that corresponds to our physical genitalia, which tends also to produce the hormones appropriate to that sex.

This being said, the norm here is not the center, because the body, with its physical sexual makeup, skews the spectrum into two bell curves—one for the masculine, one for feminine. This is not a single curve in which the norm is at the center, where there the greatest percentage of people would experience themselves as equally male or female, with equal attraction to both sexes.

The two sexes might better be pictured as an upside down parabola, where the truly gender neutral individual is the most rare, while those with a defined sexual identity would group at each opposite side—as biology would tend to predict.

But the point here is not to counter gender theory, but to call attention to the injustice of using terminology to devalue an individual—specialized terminology, invented in order to cast doubt upon a person’s values.

You can’t make a new entrance on the cultural stage and change the words at will. Oh yes, language does evolve! Otherwise we would still be speaking Latin or Old Norse. But it evolves over time in the context of a population of speakers. It should not be some culture-extraneous ideology that sets out to alter the whole course of a linguistic heritage.

Don’t make me say kiddos or doggos; don’t do the new translation trip; don’t make me hetero-determinative. Don’t mess with my language.